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Tag: American Revolution

William Watkins | Sunday September 17, 2017 at 1:24 AM PDT | Comments Off on National Idolatry and Constitution Day

By federal statute, September 17 is designated as a holy day in the American civic religion. On that day in 1787, the delegates to the Philadelphia Convention affixed their signatures to the document that they had created and that governs us today. The website constitutionday.com encourages public demonstrations of love for the Constitution and...Read More »

William Watkins | Saturday June 3, 2017 at 11:33 AM PDT | Comments Off on Response to Gordon Lloyd’s Review of Crossroads for Liberty

Gordon Lloyd has a review up on the Law of Liberty Blog of my book Crossroads for Liberty. Lloyd is the Dockson Emeritus Professor of Public Policy at Pepperdine University and has been heavily involved in the creation of the useful website TeachingAmericanHistory.org. I had the pleasure of meeting Professor Lloyd a few years...Read More »

William Watkins | Tuesday January 17, 2017 at 11:30 AM PDT | Comments Off on What Trump Can Learn from the Treaty that Created America

In January, the winds of political change often blow with ferocity. The District of Columbia is now bracing itself for a gale-force disruption as Donald Trump prepares to become the 45th President of the United States. An upheaval in foreign affairs, trade, and immigration policy is in the offing. It’s tempting to focus solely...Read More »

Gary Galles | Monday February 8, 2016 at 2:45 PM PDT | Comments Off on Trumping Washington Won’t Make America Great Again

Americans have begun voting in the process to select the 44th person to succeed George Washington as President. Unfortunately, missing from the process have been the principles that animated Washington as America’s “indispensable man,” in historian Forrest MacDonald’s words. The character that made him “first in war, first in peace, and first in the...Read More »

Gary Galles | Wednesday December 9, 2015 at 1:05 PM PDT | Comments Off on “Free They Must Remain”: John Milton’s Enduring Wisdom

John Milton is one of history’s foremost English poets, and according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, “the most significant English author after William Shakespeare.” He is most famous for Paradise Lost, considered the finest epic poem in the English language. That makes the date of his birth, December 9, 1608, worth commemorating. Milton also advanced...Read More »

What gives some people the right to rule others? At least since John Locke’s time, the most common and seemingly compelling answer has been “the consent of the governed.” When the North American revolutionaries set out to justify their secession from the British Empire, they declared, among other things: “Governments are instituted among Men,...Read More »